12 Years and 12 labors of Pope Francis: 2013-2025

“Accepto.” It was Wednesday, March 13, 2013, at 7:05 p.m., in front of the fresco of the Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, when Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio accepted the office just conferred on him by the Holy Spirit acting through his fellow cardinals.

No one can know what feelings were going through the Argentine prelate's mind at that moment, except perhaps Benedict XVI. From his residence in Castel Gandolfo, the pope who had resigned some days earlier waited to see his successor appear in the Loggia of St. Peter's Basilica. A month earlier, he had announced that he no longer had the strength to carry out the Petrine ministry.

The 115 cardinal electors went to the other side of the South Atlantic, to Argentina, to find that strength.

Appearing before 200,000 faithful gathered in St. Peter's Square, the man who had just chosen the name Francis took over from the German pontiff and inaugurated his own pontificate, as different in style as Benedict had been different from John Paul II and John Paul II from Paul VI.

Now that Pope Francis' earthly journey has come to an end, we look back on 12 major labors led by the Argentine pontiff, one for each year of the 12 years he sat upon the Chair of Peter. Given the challenges he faced, they often required a Herculean effort.

“Regarding the next pope, we need a man who, starting from the contemplation and adoration of Jesus Christ, will help the Church come out of herself and go to the existential peripheries of humanity.” These words were spoken by Cardinal Bergoglio just six days before his election to the Chair of Peter.

They would undoubtedly become the core of his program. The first Argentine pontiff in history was convinced that a self-referential and self-sufficient Church is a dying Church. Pope Francis tirelessly repeated his desire to see Christians get off their couches and go to the geographical, social, and spiritual areas longing for the Gospel of Christ. He called these areas the existential peripheries, “where the mystery of sin, pain, and injustice reside ... where all misery is found.”

This roadmap led Pope Francis to address non-Christians, notably in his encyclicals Laudato si' and Fratelli tutti, as well as the poor and destitute whom modern societies ignore: the migrant, the elderly, the disabled, the unborn. It led him to visit countries that no Bishop of Rome had ever set foot in before, such as the Arabian Peninsula in February 2019, Iraq in 2021, and South Sudan in 2023.

It also led him to approach certain issues from a more pastoral than dogmatic perspective. Calling on the Church to keep its “doors open” and not to act like a “customs post,” the “Pope of Mercy” regularly paid special attention to those sometimes left on the doorsteps of churches. The December 2023 declaration Fiducia supplicans authorizing blessings for same-sex couples and divorced and remarried couples should be read in this light.

Rarely has an encyclical had such an impact. Laudato si', Pope Francis' text “on care for our common home,” has reached millions of people who are distant from Catholicism but concerned about the urgency of climate change.

Francis explained that he chose his name to help him remember the teachings of the Poverello of Assisi, St. Francis. He wanted to revive the Church's entire teaching on ecology in a new and daring style, and issued a cry to the world, calling for conversion regarding our attitude towards consumerism, the environment, and how changes in climate affect the poorest peoples.

At nearly 87 years of age, concerned and affected by the inaction of political leaders, in the fall of 2023 he wrote a follow-up to Laudato si' with the apostolic exhortation Laudate Deum, in which he devoted an entire chapter to the COP28 in Dubai. He also announced his intention to attend the conference to raise awareness, but in the end, he had to cancel for health reasons.

July 8, 2013: Pope Francis had only been on the throne of St. Peter for a few weeks when he decided to visit the small Italian island of Lampedusa to “weep for the dead” of immigration. Facing the sea, after a long moment of reflection, he threw a wreath of flowers in memory of the thousands of people who had drowned in the Mediterranean, a sea that had become a “great cemetery” as a result of the crisis. Indeed, between 2014 and 2020, more than 20,000 migrants died in the Mediterranean, according to the UN. His gesture was the first of many.

In 2015, in an unprecedented appeal, he asked every parish in Europe to take in a migrant family. A year later, on his return from a trip to Lesvos (Greece), he brought back three Syrian Muslim families to settle in Rome.

Some Catholics considered the Pope naive on the issue of immigration. For them, his repeated calls to welcome migrants ultimately threatened peace and culture. The Pope was aware of the criticism but did not budge. Migrants are “the image of Christ knocking at our doors,” he insisted during his trip to Morocco in 2019. He acknowledged the rights of countries to have borders and pointed out the need to be able to help migrants integrate into society, but these policies must be in the context of remembering that migrants are people with faces, names, and dreams.

In 2020, he reaffirmed in Fratelli tutti that Europe “has the means to defend the centrality of the human person and to find the right balance between its twofold moral responsibility to protect the rights of its citizens and to assure assistance and acceptance to migrants.”

Condemning those who consider and treat migrants as “less human,” the Bishop of Rome deemed that, “For Christians, this way of thinking and acting is unacceptable, since it sets certain political preferences above deep convictions of our faith.”

He renewed this appeal during his trip to Marseille in September 2023. “People who risk drowning when abandoned at sea must be rescued. It is a duty of humanity, it is a duty of civilization!” he declared.

Every October, his name came up when predictions were made for the Nobel Peace Prize winner. Francis never received it. Nevertheless, the 266th successor of Peter never ceased to work for the resolution or appeasement of numerous crises.

One example is the restoration, through the Holy See, of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the United States in December 2014. From the start of his pontificate, he strove to build peace between Israel and Palestine. Sadly, he couldn’t prevent the return of bloody war in the Holy Land between Hamas and Israel.

In times of crisis, Francis' diplomacy relied on dialogue, which is essential for reconciliation. He didn’t hesitate to put himself on the line, as he did on that day in April 2019 when he kissed the feet of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, a Catholic, and his opponent Riek Machar, a Presbyterian, in order to urge them to find the path to peace.

Condemning the use of nuclear weapons on numerous occasions, he considered the ultimate goal of total nuclear disarmament to be a moral and humanitarian imperative. Echoing the words of Paul VI -- “Never again war!” -- he questioned in Fratelli tutti the notion of “just war,” a concept he considered “very difficult” to defend today. 

The day after Russian troops invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Pope Francis went alone to the Russian Embassy to the Holy See to “express his concern.” This unprecedented gesture was followed by dozens of calls for peace in his homilies, speeches, and Angelus addresses. On December 8, 2022, he broke down in tears during a prayer to the Virgin Mary, referring to “the martyred Ukrainian people.” In an effort to keep the doors of dialogue open, he said he was ready to travel to Moscow to talk with Vladimir Putin.

On the evening of his election, in the Loggia of St. Peter's Basilica, Pope Francis made a lasting impression by presenting himself as a simple bishop and speaking of the Church of Rome as “the one that presides over all the Churches in charity.” For one of his biographers, Austen Ivereigh, the use of this “old formula” signified the new successor of Peter's desire to establish “collegiality in action.”

Explaining in his first apostolic exhortation, Evangelii Gaudium, that “excessive centralization, rather than proving helpful, complicates the Church’s life and her missionary outreach,” the Argentine pontiff very early on multiplied initiatives to move toward a more collegial government. 

This is the point of the small council of cardinals from around the world whom Francis called together to support him in his desire to reform the Curia. He also wanted to give more freedom to synodal assemblies, collegial institutions revitalized by the Second Vatican Council.

He launched a three-year global Synod on synodality. Begun in 2021, the process was intended to make the Catholic Church more welcoming, participatory, and missionary, and less clerical and centralized.

Wanting to see a greater role for lay people and women in the government of the Church at the parish, diocesan, and Roman levels, the Pope appointed lay members to the Synod of Bishops for the first time.

In line with the pontificate of Benedict XVI, Pope Francis wanted to wage a “total battle” against sexual abuse of minors and vulnerable persons in the Church. A year after his election, he set up a commission tasked with proposing “the most appropriate initiatives” to ensure that “crimes such as those that have taken place will never happen again.”

In August 2018, as revelations multiplied, the pontiff published a Letter to the People of God in which he identified clericalism as a major cause of abuse. This letter was followed by the convening of an extraordinary summit on abuse in Rome in February 2019.

A few weeks later, the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi was published, requiring all clergy and religious to report any abuse they become aware of. It also requires every diocese in the world to establish “stable and easily accessible systems” for reporting sexual abuse. Importantly, it established a procedure for investigating bishops or superiors suspected of crimes or of covering up crimes.

In December 2019, the Pope abolished the pontifical secret covering proceedings relating to crimes of pedophilia. And in May 2021, he made a major revision of a chapter of the Code of Canon Law dealing with serious penalties. Crimes against minors were included. In addition, the publication of an unprecedented report on former Cardinal McCarrick —who was guilty of numerous sexual abuses — demonstrated the pontiff's desire to uncover the truth about the failings of the Holy See in this case.

However, the pontificate suffered from shortcomings, and victims regularly denounced a certain slowness or lukewarmness in Rome in implementing reforms. Francis himself acknowledged the flaws. “I have made serious mistakes,” he admitted in connection with a case in Chile where he defended a bishop suspected of covering up for a pedophile priest.

The dramatic resignation of Jesuit Father Hans Zollner in March 2023 from the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors casts doubt on the effectiveness and governance of this body, which he created in 2014. However, the publication in late 2024 of a first — and timid — report on the state of the fight against abuse in the Catholic Church shows the Vatican's desire to coordinate protection measures worldwide.

From the beginning of his pontificate in 2013, Pope Francis has warned Latin American bishops against clericalism. In the summer of 2018, in the wake of a sex abuse scandal in Ireland, in his Letter to the People of God he called for an end to this improper understanding of Church authority.

Indeed, he establishes a very clear link between the abuse of power, stemming from clericalism, and sexual abuse: “To say ‘no’ to abuse is to say an emphatic ‘no’ to all forms of clericalism,” he writes. His rebukes of clergy who have distanced themselves from the faithful were one of the leitmotifs of his pontificate.

At the same time, Francis never stopped warning against the risk of “clericalizing the laity.” This view may explain his decision not to move forward on the issue of ordaining married men at the end of the Synod on the Amazon in October 2019, even though the conclusions called for greater openness.

Additionally, his appointment of certain lay people to key positions illustrated his desire to strengthen the place of lay people in the institution. He would also allow lay people to vote at the Synod on the Future of the Church, a privilege formerly reserved for bishops.

“I suffer [...] when I see, in the Church [...] that the role of women in service is sliding into a role of servitude,” the Pope declared at the beginning of his pontificate in August 2013. The issue of women's place in the Church was particularly dear to Pope Francis, and he emphasized the need to develop a “theology of women.” A year later, he awarded the Ratzinger Prize to Frenchwoman Anne-Marie Pelletier, a biblical scholar specializing in this issue.

Although Francis closed the door to the ordination of women deacons in his apostolic exhortation Querida Amazonia in 2020, he nevertheless wanted reflection on a female diaconate to continue. He supported the conclusions of the Synod on Synodality at the end of 2024, which moved in this direction.

Francis also appointed several women to high-level positions in the Vatican. In January 2025, he appointed the first female prefect in the history of the Roman Curia, Sister Simona Brambilla, an Italian nun, to head the dicastery responsible for religious life. In the same month, he announced that Sister Raffaella Petrini would become head of the Governorate of Vatican City State. These two women thus took up positions previously reserved for cardinals.

The appointment of Sister Nathalie Becquart as undersecretary of the Synod of Bishops in 2021 is also very significant. The French nun became the first woman to obtain the right to vote in this assembly. In the same year, he appointed Sister Alessandra Smerilli as “number two” in the large dicastery for the Service of Integral Human Development. He also brought three women into the dicastery for Bishops, among other significant appointments of women to Vatican positions.

“Spiritual Alzheimer's disease,” “gossiping,” “worldly profit,” “self-exhibition…” In his now-famous speech on the 15 diseases of the Roman Curia delivered at Christmas 2014, Pope Francis didn’t spare his own administration. Indeed, after the Vatileaks scandal that shook the end of Benedict XVI's pontificate, the College of Cardinals had entrusted Cardinal Bergoglio with the task of reforming the system.

The Argentine pontiff quickly took steps to carry out a structural reform of the Curia. To this end, he surrounded himself with a small collegial working group of cardinals from around the world.

In addition to reforming the Holy See's communications bodies and consolidating the pontifical councils, the pope and his council tackled the management of Vatican finances. The roadmap was clear: fight corruption and money laundering, promote transparency, and simplify and clarify decision-making processes. As a result, the powerful Secretariat of State, for example, was stripped of all the financial funds and real estate assets it had previously administered.

With the dismissal in September 2020 of the former number three in the Vatican, Cardinal Angelo Becciu, who was suspected of embezzlement while serving as substitute for the Secretariat of State, Pope Francis accelerated his reform. The opening of a historic trial at the Vatican in July 2021 following the scandal surrounding the risky purchase of a building in London is evidence of the cultural change that has taken place under the pontificate. Cardinal Becciu ended up being sentenced in the first trial to five and a half years in prison.

On March 19, 2022, after nine years of work, the Pope finally published the new Apostolic Constitution updating the Roman Curia. Titled Praedicate Evangelium – “Proclaim the Gospel” – it replaces the constitution Pastor Bonus published by John Paul II in 1988.

Francis then ratified numerous restructuring measures taken during his pontificate, as well as some unprecedented decisions, such as the possibility of appointing lay people, both men and women, to head dicasteries. However, the end of the pontificate was marked by a sense of weariness and frustration among Vatican employees, who quietly criticized the reforms as insufficient.

Perhaps one of the main focuses of his pontificate, dialogue with Islam has reached an unprecedented level under Francis, after relations with Muslims hit a rough spot following the misunderstandings that arose in the wake of Benedict XVI's 2006 speech in Regensburg.

In a decade marked by Islamist terrorism and the cruelty of ISIS in the Middle East in particular, the Pope held numerous meetings with Muslim dignitaries. He held that the culture of encounter is the only alternative to “the barbarism of those who fan the flames of hatred,” he explained at a peace conference held at Al-Azhar University in Egypt in 2017.

This compass led him in February 2019 to Abu Dhabi (United Arab Emirates), where he sealed a historic agreement with the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar Al-Tayyeb. Together, the two men signed an unprecedented document on “Human Fraternity,” a veritable compendium of common values to be upheld by all religions and intended to be given to all influential leaders.

Pope Francis' third encyclical, Fratelli tutti, represents a decisive step forward in interreligious dialogue. He quotes Ahmed Al Tayyeb several times, saying that he inspired the encyclical, and renews his call for all religions to condemn violence committed in their name. One cannot do violence in the name of God, he insisted. He met his “brother” Al Tayyeb for the sixth time in five years during a trip to Bahrain in 2022.

In 2021, during a meeting with Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq, the Pope expressed his desire for dialogue with Shiite Islam. It was in this spirit that he appointed the Archbishop of Tehran, Dominique Mathieu, as cardinal in December 2024.

It was one of the great images of his pontificate. On February 12, 2016, nearly a thousand years after the Great Schism of 1054, the head of the Catholic Church met the Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow for the first time. This historic meeting, which took place at the airport in Cuba, sealed the warming of relations between the two Churches.

However, the policy of rapprochement was interrupted when, on February 24, 2022, Russian troops invaded Ukraine, with the blessing of Patriarch Kirill. While the Pope and the Patriarch were planning to meet in Jerusalem in June of the same year, the disagreements generated by the war in Ukraine came to the fore, with Pope Francis reportedly asking Kirill not to become “Putin's altar boy.” This setback in relations with the Russian Orthodox Church is undoubtedly one of Pope Francis' great regrets.

On a completely different front, Pope Francis traveled to Stockholm, Sweden, in 2016 to mark the 500th anniversary of the Lutheran Reformation. Together with representatives of the Lutheran World Federation, he signed a joint declaration calling for overcoming the “conflicts of the past” in order to move toward greater communion and solidarity.

In 2018, he traveled to Geneva, Switzerland, on an “ecumenical pilgrimage” to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the World Council of Churches. The organization brings together some 348 Orthodox, Protestant, and Anglican churches and represents 500 million faithful.

Francis' style and personality also led him to forge close ties with his fellow Christians, particularly Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople, whom he met around 10 times and who inspired his encyclical Laudato si', and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, with whom he worked on resolving the conflict in South Sudan.

At the end of 2023, the publication of Fiducia Supplicans sparked a reaction among the Copts, who announced that they were suspending their theological dialogue with the Catholic Church.

The death of the pontiff leaves to his successor the plan to visit Turkey with Patriarch Bartholomew to mark the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea.

On July 16, 2021, the Argentine pope caused a storm with the motu proprio Traditionis Custodes, which repealed Benedict XVI's 2007 decision to expand the possibilities for celebrating Mass according to the 1962 missal, described as an “extraordinary form of the Roman rite.”

This designation was abandoned by Francis, who expressed concern that the liturgy was being used to cause division. This decision was met with strong incomprehension among sectors of the Catholic Church, particularly in France and the United States.

In February 2022, however, the Pope confirmed the Fraternity of St. Peter's right to celebrate according to the Tridentine rite, as this community, loyal to the Pope, had been specifically founded for this purpose. The Pope wished to leave it to the bishops to discern on a case-by-case basis according to the local situation. Francis nevertheless desired the greatest possible unity in the liturgy, in accordance with the canon of the Missal promulgated by Paul VI in 1969.

On June 29, 2022, with the apostolic letter Desidero desideravi, he recalled that the liturgy must guarantee “one and the same prayer,” capable of expressing the unity of the Church as desired by the Second Vatican Council.